


This Last Moment

by DarlaBlack



Series: Ficlets & Prompt Responses [5]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, Romance, Season/Series 08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 17:53:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15935384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: She leaves her heart with him there in that room.





	This Last Moment

She won’t let the medical examiner touch him, won’t let anyone,  _anyone_  perform an autopsy.

“We need to know what they did, Dana.”

“No,” she says, firm. “We know what they did. They killed him.” And her voice is like iron _._

She sits with him for hours. Her knees hurt. She’s thrown up four times since she’s been here. It’s cold. Still, she won’t let anyone touch him, won’t hardly move, lest her demand be ignored.

Her eyes are rubbed carmine against the ash of her skin. She won’t cry.  _How can you cry if you’re dead?_  she thinks. He can’t cry; she can’t cry.

She holds his hand.

Skinner finds her this way, hours later, expression vacant, still touching him. She is a beautiful thing made of glass that has broken.

“You can’t,” he says, but she only stares at him. “You can’t stay. We need to bring him home,” he insists.

At this her mask trembles. Home. Bring him home. That’s all she wanted to do. She won’t let go when Skinner touches her shoulder. “I just need this one moment. This last one.”

But when she says the word  _last_ , something cracks. She feels the spreading fissure all along the surface of her self. She will be nothing but powder soon. Last one, she thinks. The last one. She imagines the so many lasts she has now to think of. Last smile, last stupid joke, last “good morning” into her neck with a warm hand under her pajama top. And this: the last touch. Her hand is as cold as his.

In the end, Skinner has to bring her from the morgue himself, has to almost carry her. She leaves her heart in the room with him.

In the airport, Skinner hands her a bottle of orange juice, a muffin, and she only then remembers the baby. She cries again for failing them both.

-

Months later, when his hand is warm again, but not yet his heart, she wonders if he can see the glue, if he knows that there are pieces missing. She thinks they are both cold and ungrateful. Gratitude requires acceptance, and she is not quite sure if this is real. And at his overturned life, she wonders what he has to be grateful for anyway. She wonders if he had been ready, if he’d wanted to die—and that is why he let himself love her. He was not expecting to be here for this: the hard part of living.

His life feels a flimsy thing and disposable. He nearly throws it away again. And then again. She cannot stand the waiting to lose him a second time, but waiting is all she can do. It is all she has known since she lost him.

Until one night he thaws. At her door, two a.m., eyes red and voice croaking.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

She opens the door, opens her arms, and he falls into them, nose against her neck at last and then, again, finally again, she won’t stop touching him. His skin is warm, his jaw rough, muscles hard under her eager touch. The thaw spreads like blood into cotton and they absorb it all. His fingers cradling her belly, petting her cheek: “I’m sorry.”

Her own fingers, up under his shirt to graze his chest, tremble on his hope-warmed skin. “Are you here?” She asks.

“I’m here,” he says. And with his own, he brings back her heart.


End file.
